User:Serena Chen 009/Report

Introduction
This report reflects on my experience with the Wiki Education training task of contributing to an Wikipedia article that is marked as stub – meaning the article significantly lacks useful information and coverage to make it considered as an encyclopedia article – and with the overall interaction with the Wikipedia community. From this experience, I have acquired a decent amount of knowledge about Wikipedia. While I appreciate this experience for what I have learned about this community, I also found out that there are many things Wikipedia can do to improve itself. In the next few paragraphs, I will discuss my learning experiences as well as my comments and suggestions to the community of Wikipedia.

Reflection: Experience, Comments, and Suggestions
When I was at the stage of finding an article to expand on, a link to the list of stubs provided great help to me. I was able to dive into the categories that interest me and found several articles that I was considering expanding in just a while. Wikipedia is doing an excellent job on what the book Building Successful Online Communities (BSOC) says about “Ask and Ye Shall Receive”. According to BSOC, “making the list of needed contributions easily visible increases the likelihood that the community will provide them” (26). Wikipedia’s list of stubs and the “help out” section under its community portal are great examples of what the book mentions, and I believe Wikipedia has encouraged a lot more contributions through making its need visible in pages and sections like these ones than if it hasn’t done so.

However, I have also noticed a problem within these efforts to encourage contributions: it is hard to reach the page of the stub list. Compared to the community portal where links to specific articles-in-need are provided, I like the list of stubs better because it is well organized into categories and allows me to easily research on my interest topics. But many times, once I closed up the tab for the list of stubs, I could not find any other way to get into it again except digging out the link that was provided by my professor in our course syllabus. I would recommend Wikipedia to make this list easier to find (one possible way could be to directly link it under the community portal page) as BSOC suggests “providing easy-to-use tools for finding and tracking work that needs to be done increases the amount that gets done” (27). Another reason why this change is essential is that, by making the list of categories easier to find, Wikipedia would encourage more contributions from members who are motivated to contribute by their intrinsic interests on certain topics and the pleasure they derive from working on those topics that they care about, especially newcomers like me who hasn’t developed a deep bond with the community yet.

Another part I suggest Wikipedia change is the layout of the main page and the learn to edit page. When I was trying to discover more about the community on my own for a sudden arousal of interest, my passion was quickly cooled down by the wordy layouts of the pages. While as an encyclopedia, Wikipedia might need more literal content than other online communities, but pages loaded with words are very likely to drive potential members and newcomers away from further engaging with the community. Especially for the main page and the introduction page of a community, where most people would go to get their first impression of this community, good and attractive page design is crucial for recruiting and keeping new members. Therefore, I suggest reorganizing the main page and incorporating more symbols or more interactive webpage designs. I also recommend to add interactive exercises and more video contents to the learn to edit page beside all the reading materials, because I discovered that those exercises and videos from the Wiki Education trainings made it much easier for me to get familiar with the community’s norms and rules as well as to develop further interest in contributing to the community.

The last piece of advice I have for Wikipedia is to create portals linked to other social media that allows the members within the community to share content and achievements with outside communities. According to BSOC, allowing members to share content and their achievement in a community with acquaintances “will increase the visibility of the community among the users’ friends and thereby increase the likelihood of them joining” (187). This suggestion from the book is tested to be true and effective with my own experience: after I shared screenshots of my contribution to an article with my friends and families, many of them developed an interest in Wikipedia, and 3 of them actually asked me how the editing works and said they are planning to try making contributions on topics that they care about. Therefore, by making it easier for current members to share information of Wikipedia to outside communities through portals to other communities, Wikipedia could increase the exposure of this community to more people and recruit more new members.

Beside the above suggestions on what I believe Wikipedia could change or could do to improve itself, there are a lot of other things that Wikipedia is already doing to make it a successful online community. The talk page of different articles provide an excellent space for members to provide and receive feedback from others, which helps to increase member’s knowledge and compliance with the community norms and to enhance motivation to contribute. The sandboxes help the newcomers to learn faster and reduce the possible harm that newcomers might cause due to lack of experience with the community. The undo function protects the community by allowing the members to delete any inappropriate or bad contents. And the barnstars act as rewarding incentives that motivate some members to contribute more and to be more committed to the community. I hope my experience and suggestions could help Wikipedia to improve and become a more successful community.

Work Cited
Kraut, Robert E., and Paul Resnick. Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. The MIT Press, 2012.